Writing your CV - What you need to know

The continued low oil price and subsequent lack of employment opportunities in the global oil and gas sector has resulted in a lot of people questioning their CV and writing revisions that, in many cases, may not be necessary.

When you are writing your CV you may received input from multiple sources, offering various, potentially conflicting, opinions on how you should compose your CV and what content you should include.

Advice will vary - different people hold different opinions on the correct length, the correct font size, whether you should use bullet points or full sentences and all manner of other subjects.

We feel that your CV has one purpose; To get you invited to speak about an employment opportunity which could be of interest to you. If it does this it is 'fit for purpose'.

Our suggestions for writing your CV are as follows;

• Catch our attention on the first page. Include skills that are relevant to the role you are applying for early on. If we like the first page we will read the second.
• Your CV does not need to be an exhaustive list of everything you have ever done, just enough to catch our attention and get you invited to speak further.
• Include your contact information, if there is no phone number we cannot call you.
• Bullet points or sentences are both acceptable options.
• Avoid big blocks of text, if it looks like it is going to take a long time to read the reader may skip it.
• 3 - 4 pages is our preferred length - we will not submit anything longer than this to our clients.
• Give details of any key achievements you had in previous roles.
• Things that may put us off include; inclusion of skills or experience that are irrelevant to the role, spelling mistakes, particularly poor grammar and changing the format part way through (you can update a previous version of your CV, just keep the font and lay out consistent)
• We do not feel that you need to pay someone to write your CV, in fact we would counsel against it (it is the low oil price that is making it difficult to get a job, not the fact that you used bullet points on your CV)
• We do not feel that you need a large number of different versions of your CV; have one master copy and then tweak the order of skills and experience to match the requirements of a specific role.

These suggestions are shared in the interest of helping job seekers in the oil and gas sector who may be questioning how to present their CVs. It is tough going out there, let's stick together.

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